IPOs

While Silicon Valley firms hold back on their IPOs and there’s hand-wringing over burn rates, two Boston-based startups had highly successful IPOs less than a week apart. Just over a week ago, furniture shopping service Wayfair went public and raised over $300M in its IPO, then HubSpot had a successful IPO of its own a week later. I think it’s safe to say the Boston startup scene… Read More

Friday was a busy day for tech companies on Wall Street, with GrubHub, Five9, and IMS Health going public on the same day. It went well: GrubHub spiked 30.77%, Five9 9.14%, and IMS Health 15%. A good crop, you could say.
On the other end of the stick, a number of young-ish, but already public technology companies took it on the nose: Facebook fell 4.61% on Friday, while Twitter gave up… Read More

Rocket Fuel’s first day of public trading seems to have lived up to the company’s name.
The ad-tech firm revealed its intentions to go public last month, and last night sold 4 million shares at a price of $29, raising a total of $116 million at a valuation of nearly $1 billion. Today the share price went up as high as $62.50 before closing at $55, about 90 percent higher than the… Read More

IPOs are hot again. Naturally, the press is focused on high-profile offerings like Facebook’s. But, I think there is a more important group of companies going public: Smaller, less sexy Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) startups. Think of it as the Sexy IPOs versus the SaaS-y IPOs.
They aren’t household names, but the most recent SaaS IPOs (Cornerstone, Jive, Brightcove and Bazaarvoice)… Read More

For Yelp, this has been a very good day. The restaurant review site was received exceptionally well by Wall Street during its first day as a publicly traded company, closing at a price of $24.58 per share, up a full 63 percent from its $15 IPO price. Read More

In this video interview, I ask VC Jim Breyer what he thinks about the current IPO market and whether he agrees with Steve Case, who argues that we need more IPOs to create more jobs—“90% of job growth is after a company goes public.”
Breyer disagrees with Case that IPOs are the answer. At About the 2:35 mark, he says that the IPO process could be made a little bit easier… Read More

Silicon Valley loves to dismiss Asian companies as nothing more than copycats who thrive, particularly in China, because the government protects them and punishes Western competitors. Even when the businesses in question are dramatically different in practice and scale, they are described as the “eBay of China”, “The Google of China” and “the YouTube of… Read More

In Silicon Valley the terms of venture capital deals, the prices of valuations and the real stories of ousters are routinely dished, whether they always show up in the press or not. Sure it’s all off the record or on background or whispered at a coffee shop, but people who live here love what they do and when companies and valuations grow this quickly, it’s hard to keep the… Read More

Boutique tech investment bank Pacific Crest Securities has purchased Pacific Epoch, a Shanghai-based investment research firm specializing in technology. This gives Pacific Crest fifty more bodies on the ground in China to deliver investors better investment research than “This is the (fill-in-the-blank-Western-Internet-company) of China.”
That lazy marketing strategy has… Read More

(Editor’s note: This is the third installment in a series about the late stage, secondary investing craze sweeping the venture capital business. For the first two installments go here and here.)
On May 26, 2009 Mike sat down with Yuri Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and a Flipcam to talk about the then-scandalous $200 million investment DST made in Facebook, at a price that valued the company… Read More

Around 2006 there was a sudden increase in so-called “partial liquidations,” where entrepreneurs could take some money off the table during a mid-stage funding round. Considered unheard of at the time, now they’re the norm for companies doing well.
Then in 2009, we saw the rise of secondary markets, which allowed early stage investors and employees to take some money off… Read More

There is a lot of hype swirling that 2011 is going to be the big comeback year for the venture-backed IPO. And we’re talking about big, gaudy IPOs, not small ones that essentially function as another funding round. And interestingly, pundits and investors expect some new $1 billion companies to debut in both cleantech and Internet sectors.
So maybe the fourth quarter was just the calm… Read More

With apologies to Car Talk, you’ve squandered a perfectly good half-of-a-year watching “Why Is This News?” and we decided to reward you with a show that actually contains business analysis, rather than a rant about hotels or the hijinks of Michael Arrington.
In this week’s episode Paul and Sarah give their picks for the dumbest and smartest people of 2010, a… Read More

Back in August we reported that Elevation Partners had signed a letter of intent to buy secondary shares in Pandora, the long-suffering, now-hot online radio station. I wondered what ever happened to that deal, so I started digging. As it turned out, shares were sold but Elevation didn’t get them.
Here’s what we’ve been able to piece together, from several sources on… Read More

The biggest difference between the Internet scenes in Silicon Valley and China this year? We’re all still asking when Facebook will go public, while Chinese companies are filing left and right. Part of this is an investor demand to get a chunk of that 400 million person strong and growing Chinese Internet market.
But part of this is cultural. American Internet entrepreneurs are more… Read More

A few weeks ago we flagged a growing trend of Chinese Internet companies going public on the Nasdaq and New York Stock Exchange and getting pretty good valuations. At the time I was surprised more people weren’t paying attention– especially given how few Internet IPOs we’re having in the US and how much of the returns from those Chinese deals were flowing back to Silicon Valley. Read More

In the peak of the Internet bubble, a company’s valuation– and press attention– would soar simply by whispering the words “John Doerr is an investor.” But in early Web 2.0 days, the once-everywhere venture capitalist seemed to fall off of the tech press’s radar, at least when it came to Internet investing.
But boy, has Doerr made up for lost time this… Read More

Nat Goldhaber of Claremont Creek Ventures thinks that 2011 will be the year of the cleantech IPO…finally. So does that mean that America hasn’t totally lost the cleantech race after all?
The most optimistic case is that we’re in a clump of countries leading the pack. The glass-half-empty version: Politics, boneheaded legislation and our lousy capital markets will saddle… Read More

In retrospect, Tesla may have been cleantech’s Netscape moment. It didn’t get off to the world’s greatest start, but like a few other venture-backed IPOs, lately it has been trading at nearly double its opening price.
Meanwhile, a few other cleantech companies have filed S-1s and several more are waiting in the wings, watching to see what the market does. To continue the… Read More

Yes, China is taking over the world. Or at least the Internet. No, this is not like the WE’LL-ALL-BE-WORKING-FOR-JAPAN-oh-nevermind scare of the 1980s. Why? Because China has more than 1 billion people. It already represents the largest online audience in the world and is less than 30% penetrated and has Internet spending per capita that’s less than one-third of the United… Read More